


After the War: The Abandoned

by GodfreyRaphael



Series: After the War [2]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Aliens, Crime, Everyone tries to go back to normal but there's no going back now, Human Rights, Human Rights Abuses, Inspired by Black Lives Matter and the Islamic State, Nothlit Lives Matter, Nothlit Rights Movement, Nothlit State, Nothlits, Post War, Post War Struggles, Revolt, Revolution, Terrorism, War, Yeerks, aliens on earth
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-21
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-08-25 21:41:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16668817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GodfreyRaphael/pseuds/GodfreyRaphael
Summary: Tens of thousands of Yeerks were left behind on Earth when the Animorphs defeated the Yeerk Empire's invasion force on our planet. These Yeerks were given the power to morph, provided that they stayed in their new forms for more than two hours and became nothlits. Most of the Yeerks left on Earth accepted this choice, hoping that they would be able to experience the universe without having to share with another mind and being. However, as it turns out, becoming a human is way easier than living as one. And the Yeerk nothlits were certainly not expecting humanity's capacity tonotforgive and forget. Many nothlits know that this wasn't the way things were supposed to be, but only a few of them had the courage to speak up. Even fewer of them had the audacity to do the impossible: take control of an American city and attempt to singlehandedly restart the Yeerk invasion of Earth.This is the story of the rise and fall of the Nothlit State, and it is also the story of those who still loved and supported the very Empire that had abandoned them and left them for dead.





	1. Foreword and Introduction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We explore the reasons why this story was written.

**FOREWORD AND INTRODUCTION**

  

The foundation and rise of the Nothlit State was one of the most unprecedented events of the 21st century and the New Tens. No one could have predicted, no one could have known that the Yeerk nothlits, those Yeerks who were made to take human and animal forms following the defeat of the Yeerk invasion of Earth, would come together to rise up against the American government and establish their own nation within the United States. The nothlits, being a minority, have always been treated as such at best, and as undesirables at worst, and they notably have had less rights than the rest of the US population and even those Yeerks who refused or were unable to take on the morphing technology and become nothlits and are now being hosted by voluntary humans.

The nothlits established the Nothlit Rights Movement to raise awareness about their deplorable situation and the conditions in which they have been forced to live by means of the tenements that have been constructed in cities across the United States to house the tens of thousands of Yeerks who became nothlits following the end of the invasion. The Nothlit Rights Movements championed a noble cause, and their intentions were good, but some of its members warped the core ideology of the Nothlit Rights Movement and turned it into their own vision of a nothlit-dominated nation-state in which the nothlit reigned supreme over the human. Edril Kesshaan, the nothlit formerly known as Eldril One-Nine-Two of the Kes Shaan Pool and held the rank of Visser Eight, rose up in infamy to become the leader of the Nothlit State, which claims to have been inspired by the biggest terrorist threat of this decade, the Islamic State.

The rise of the Nothlit State, which started off as merely being a radicalized wing of the Nothlit Rights Movement, proved to be one of the greatest challenges in the last years of the presidency of Barack Obama, and the actual physical establishment of the Nothlit State itself in sovereign American territory (specifically in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) became the first big challenge for the new president, Donald Trump. And Trump rose to the occasion, with the Nothlit State barely lasting a month simply because the Pennsylvania National Guard have been able to contain the Nothlit State to a single city in a single county near the state's biggest city, Philadelphia, before the Nothlit State was eradicated in its physical form. Eldril escaped the Nothlit State before it fell to the National Guard, but his second in command Immib Irresbhek (formerly Immib Two-Seven-One of the Irres Bhek Pool) who was widely believed to have commanded the Nothlit State's ground forces, was killed in action, and Immib's death is widely believed to be the cause of the collapse and defeat of the Nothlit State simply because the commanders who followed Immib were simply incapable of managing small-scale conflicts, let alone take command on both the strategic and tactical layers.

But the truth about the Nothlit State, the real reason why Eldril established it and why Immib and its fighters fought to the death to defend it and keep it alive, would not come out until the publication of _The Extremists: An Average Girl's Encounters and Experiences with the Nothlit State_ by Jennifer Carson, an autobiographical account of Carson's brushes with the Nothlit State and its predecessors, the radicalized wing of the Nothlit Rights Movements. In her book, Carson revealed that the Nothlit State was merely a cover for the Yeerk Empire, which was apparently still alive and actively waging war against the Andalites in the far reaches of space, to return to Earth and restart the invasion that had failed all those years ago. This, of course, came as a shock to the majority of humanity as we had long believed that the defeat of the Yeerk invasion also meant the defeat of the Yeerk Empire itself. But all that had proved was that humans were still pretty much self-centered and arrogant to believe that we had helped bring down a star-spanning empire simply because fifty to sixty thousand Yeerks and their associated hosts and support personnel decided to lay down their arms.

Everyone else has already told their stories. The Animorphs were the first one to do so. Then followed the Controllers; first the involuntary ones who had been freed from their Yeerk masters, then the voluntary ones who admitted to collaborating with the invaders, and finally those who either remained Controllers even after the war or the ones who chose to become Controllers in the post-war times. Now it is time for the nothlits to tell their stories or, for those who are no longer with us, to have their stories told. It is only right and just and fair for those who have been both the oppressors and the oppressed, for every side of the story needs to be told to present a full, if not necessarily fair, account of the events and circumstances that have led us to where we are right now.

This is the story of the Nothlit State. This is the story of its rise and fall, and this is also the story of the Yeerk nothlits who, even though they had been abandoned and left for dead on this small insignificant blue planet by their commanders, officers, and Emperor, still worked their hardest to help the Yeerk Empire take over the Earth once again. But above all, this is the story of the nothlits, those who were not born human but became one, and all of the struggles, the trials and tribulations that these beings have had to go through to finally be recognized as our equals.

As I have said earlier in this introduction, I intend for this to be as full an account as possible of the rise and fall of the Nothlit State. I have attempted to be as impartial in this account as possible but, seeing as I am drawing mostly from second-hand accounts and from nothlits who have, for lack of a better term, nothing good to say about the Nothlit State, it is inevitable that these accounts will be biased against them. But, having said that, their stories still deserve to be told, for to suppress these stories will make us no better than those who seek to deny the history that has brought us here.

Always remember, there are stories everywhere. They are all around us. All they need is someone to tell them.

**Godfrey Raphael**

* * *

A/N: Once again, I hope you don't mind that I'm using a bookish-style intro for the second entry into my After the War series. This second part was originally supposed to be told from Jen Carson's perspective once again but then I got all sorts of ideas of how the nothlits that became part of the Nothlit State came to become part of it in the first place, and I just couldn't drop this idea or even find a way to sneak it in organically into the story for The Extremists. This was a fun journey for me, and I hope that you will appreciate it just like you appreciate my other stories. And even though this is just the introduction, I would still love it if you could drop a review, just to let me know if you would like me to go ahead with this concept. Knowing myself, I would still publish the lot now that the first part is here, but still, I would love to know what you guys think! - GR


	2. Reparations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three years after the end of the Yeerk invasion, the nothlits are finally released from their internment camps.

Odret Culathesh did not think that it was possible, but he was now starting to regret ever becoming a human.

Odret Culathesh had not been born a human; in fact, he hadn’t come into being into this universe in the sense that a human would understand. That was because Odret was a Yeerk, and his original name had been Odret One-Seven-Seven of the Culat Hesh Pool, before it had been changed into its current form by the human authorities following the defeat of the Yeerk invasion of Earth at the hands of five human teenagers and one Andalite _aristh_. Odret had barely been on Earth (an Earth year at the most) and had only recently received his first human host when the invasion force unilaterally surrendered following the venting of the Yeerks’ Pool ship by the leader of the human resistance, Jake Berenson. The victorious Andalites, as part of their peace terms with the invasion force, had given the Yeerks the chance to acquire the morphing technology, on one condition: that they would take on either a human or animal form, and then remain in that form for more than two Earth hours, effectively turning them into _nothlits_ , formerly morph-capable beings who were now stuck in the body of their latest morph.

Odret had chosen to become a human nothlit, as did the vast majority of his fellow Yeerks in the invasion force, at least the ones who were allowed the choice in the first place. Some of the other Yeerks, mostly their officers the Vissers and Sub-vissers, were not given the choice at all and were either forced to become animal nothlits, or were imprisoned in specially constructed Pools where they were only able to receive the bare minimum amount of Kandrona rays needed to sustain them every three Earth days. The process of a Yeerk becoming a human nothlit usually involved the Yeerk being placed on the Escafil device, a blue box-like device more popularly known as the “morphing cube”. Once the Yeerk had acquired the morphing power, it was placed in the hands of three randomly selected individual humans where it was told to acquire their DNA. Once the DNA had been acquired, the Yeerk was instructed on how to combine these three DNA samples, a procedure referred to by the Andalites as “Frolis Maneuver”, and then the Yeerk was told to morph into that new human amalgamation, and then wait for at least two hours and fifteen minutes, to ensure that the Yeerk would remain locked in their new nothlit form. Any Yeerk who tried to demorph before the time limit had elapsed was immediately executed; the risk of even a single Yeerk possessing the morphing power was simply too much for the Andalites to even consider.

But for those Yeerks who stayed in human morph up to the two hours and fifteen minutes time limit, there was one more step before they were officially declared as nothlits: the Yeerk would be told to attempt to demorph back into its original Yeerk body, in the off chance that the morphing technology had allowed for even just one subject to be able to retain morphing capabilities beyond the stated two Earth hours. But no such instance was ever recorded, and when the last Yeerk on Earth who had chosen to become a nothlit passed the test, the “human” population on Earth had just increased by fifty thousand.

The problem now lay in housing these fifty thousand prisoners of war, for that was what they were, prisoners on a planet that they had tried, and failed, to conquer. For that, the American government repurposed facilities and lands in the Southwest that had once been used to house and intern Japanese Americans during the Second World War and constructed new “internment camps” to house these fifty thousand prisoners. Odret and twelve hundred other nothlits had been brought to one of these camps in Arizona, named “Camp Kojima” by the humans after a Japanese human whose contributions were mostly in the video game sector of the human industry for unknown reasons. The nothlits were divided into groups of twenty and placed in pre-fabricated buildings that had been erected inside the camp.

The nothlits were treated well inside the camps. They were fed three times a day, the human equivalent to a Yeerk feeding on Kandrona rays once every three Earth days. The nothlits were allowed to grow their own gardens, form organizations of their liking, play sports and athletics, and every two days there were arts and crafts classes where the nothlits were taught how to paint, sculpt, create pottery and glassworks and perform other crafts that the humans could then sell to their fellow humans as a roundabout form of “war reparations”, goods and cash given by the vanquished to the victors to compensate for the losses and damages inflicted on the winning side during the war. But, as a general rule, the nothlits who had known each other from during the invasion could not be housed in the same barracks, so Odret barely knew any of his fellow barracks mates when he had first been sent to Camp Kojima.

That being said, Odret eventually managed to find a few of his Pool-mates in the camp: Melor Six-Seven-Zero-One, and Kanron Eight-Seven-Seven-Six-Five, both also of the Culat Hesh Pool. As the eldest and most experienced member of their little trio, Odret had immediately assumed the mantle of the group’s big brother, leading and mentoring the other two and making sure that they didn’t get into any trouble with either the camp guards or the other Yeerks. Odret was also the only one among them who had been given a human host during the invasion, and therefore he was also responsible for teaching Melor and Kanron about the human body, what to expect and what they could and couldn’t do with it.

“We were young for a couple of Yeerks, even back then,” Melor recalled. “Kanron and I were both only three cycles old when we had been assigned to Earth. We both hadn’t even finished infestation training yet, and then we surrendered. Kanron and I had chosen to become human nothlits because everyone else in our Pool who had been given the choice chose that morph. Odret also recommended that we should get human morphs because he had had a human host before the invasion force surrendered, and he promised us that he would teach us how to handle our morphs. When I first morphed into a human, I was surprised, overwhelmed even, by the colors and smells and other senses that this wonderful new body had, and even today I am still not used to being bombarded with these sights and smells, not even after fifteen years.”

The nothlits remained in the internment camps for three years following the defeat of the Yeerk invasion of Earth, and it is entirely possible that the nothlits could have remained imprisoned for many more years had the United States not decided to invade Iraq in 2003 following reports of the Middle Eastern country’s despotic dictator Saddam Hussein stockpiling weapons of mass destruction for use against either his neighbors Iran and/or Saudi Arabia or even the United States itself, reports which were of course proven false in the years since. But the nothlits didn’t know about that at the time, and in truth it could be said that some of them were already accepting the possibility that they could be kept in their camps for the rest of their lives.

But eventually, the cost of running and maintaining the internment camps while at the same time pouring money into two battlefronts (in Iraq and Afghanistan) became too much for the American government, and it was decided that it was time for the nothlits to be integrated into the greater population. News of this came to Camp Kojima in the first week of June 2003, a little more than a month after the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. For the occupants of Camp Kojima, that day had begun like every other day they had spent in the camp since they had first arrived there: wake-up and roll call at six in the morning, calisthenics at seven, then breakfast at eight before the inmates were then allowed to do whatever they wanted. They managed to eat lunch at noon and had spent about an hour and thirty minutes lounging around before they were all summoned to the camp’s central courtyard for what they had assumed was a surprise roll call.

“Well, that was what the vast majority of us thought of it at the time,” Melor Culathesh recounted. “A few of them, like Odret, thought that the human guards had asked us to gather at the square because they were going to execute us all. Odret said that he had seen it before in a human film, where the prisoners were lined up in the middle of the courtyard and then they were shot by the guards. I couldn’t have known it at the time, but Odret was really afraid that he was going to die that day, and he admitted to me that it wasn’t until the human who was in charge of the camp and its guards took out a sheet of paper and not a gun that he finally felt safe.”

“Today, the government of the United States of America has decided that the members of the species known as the Yeerks who had chosen to become trapped in human form as nothlits, are now ready to be integrated into American society.” So began the speech that the commanding officer of Camp Kojima, as well as the commanders of the other nothlit internment camps in the American Southwest, gave to their detainees on that fateful June day. “Three years have passed since the Yeerks’ invasion force was defeated right here on Earth. The government believes that that is enough time for the collective physical, mental, and emotional scars that that invasion has inflicted onto the American public to have healed. The president of the United States has signed a comprehensive peace treaty with the Andalites and the Yeerks on behalf of humanity, and part of that peace treaty requires that all nothlits on sovereign American soil is to be treated like a citizen of the United States of America, and be afforded the same rights and freedoms of an American citizen. My nothlit friends, I stand here before you to tell you that you are now free. You are now free of any obligations or duties to the Yeerk Empire, and you are now free of any and all restrictions that have been imposed upon you in this camp. You are now all free men and free women, and you are now all Americans.” The rest of the speech then consisted of the commanding officers explaining to the nothlits what they should expect to experience once they were back out in the real world, along with the documents that they were to receive on their freedom to prove that they had been released by the government of the United States on good faith and had not escaped from their camps.

Following the speech, the nothlits were then made to form queues in front of soldiers who had been assigned with handing out the aforementioned documents that would prove that the nothlits were being released by the government. These documents consisted of an identification card bearing a picture of the nothlit bearer and some basic information about him or her, along with the seal of the Department of Homeland Security. The nothlits were also given food, travel, and housing vouchers that they could use at certain participating restaurants and transportation companies, as well as the housing projects in twenty-five cities across the United States that had been built by the government using nothlit labor, another part of Yeerkish war reparations to the US. The vouchers were there because the nothlits were not expected to have any money on them once they were released from the camps.

“Name?” the soldier sitting behind the desk where Odret and his friends had queued up asked him when it was Odret’s turn.

“Odret One-Seven-Seven of the Culat Hesh Pool,” he replied.

“Yeah, about that,” the soldier said as he rummaged through the various folders on his desk. “The government’s given you a new name now. From now on, your name is Odret Culathesh. Easier on the mouth and tongue and all that. All right, Odret, here you go,” he said as he finally found the appropriate folder. “Your ID and your vouchers.”

“Thank you,” Odret said, more out of habit than any actual gratitude on his part. He had already turned his back to the soldier and was about to walk away from the queue when he heard his name being called. “Where was you gonna go again?” the soldier asked Odret.

“I was the one right next in line behind him when the soldier called out to him,” Melor Six-Seven-Zero-One recalled. “I could see that the question had caught him by surprise. Probably was fair to say that he hadn’t thought about the answer to that question at all. Though he wouldn’t confirm nor deny it, I think it’s fair to say that Odret was one of those Yeerks who had come to accept that we nothlits were all going to be kept in these internment camps for the rest of our human bodies’ lifespans. But since that was not the case, we now had to think of another place where we were going to stay for the rest of our lives instead.”

“Santa Barbara,” Odret replied to the soldier’s question. It was, according to Melor, the first place that had come to Odret’s mind.

“Santa Barbara, eh?” the soldier repeated even as he nodded his head. “If you’re looking for a place to stay, I recommend that you look for and visit the Applegate Towers. That’s the designated nothlit housing district in Santa Barbara.” The designated nothlit housing districts were, for lack of a better term, the buildings and houses that had been constructed on nothlit labor on orders from the American government.

Before Odret was finally able to leave the queue, the soldier called out to him again. “Good luck out there, man,” the soldier told Odret. “You’re gonna need it.”

Years later, Odret would confide to Melor that it wasn’t until many years had passed before he had finally grasped the meaning and significance of the soldier’s parting words to him. Back in the present day of 2003, Melor and Kanron had followed Odret’s lead in declaring their intention to live in the Santa Barbara area. Once the ID cards and vouchers had finally been distributed to all of the nothlit inmates in the camp, they were made to board buses hired and requisitioned by the US Army to transport the nothlits to the twenty-five cities with designated nothlit housing districts, Santa Barbara being one of them. That small coastal Californian town proved to be a popular destination for many of the nothlits in Camp Kojima, which was unsurprising given that many of the Yeerks had once been based in the Yeerk Pool underneath the town, which was to become famous as the main setting (with certain changes to the surroundings) for the upcoming _Animorphs_ book series. The _Animorphs_ book series purported to tell the story of the Animorphs, a small group of five morph-capable human teenagers and an Andalite _aristh_ (a rank roughly equivalent in meaning if not actual level to cadet) led by Jake Berenson who attempted to sabotage the Yeerk invasion of Earth by any means possible and necessary. But despite the possibility of mature and disturbing content in the stories themselves, the books were marketed as children’s and young adult literature, and they proved to be an instant bestseller even despite the accusations of many former and current voluntary Controllers (beings, mostly humans, who have agreed to host a Yeerk inside their heads) that the series was merely human and Andalite propaganda and the Animorphs’ own admissions that many of the stories in the books were embellished versions of their “missions”.

But before Santa Barbara rose to fame thanks to the _Animorphs_ series, it was a sleepy little town with a designated nothlit housing district right on the edge of its limits. The district itself was surrounded by ten-foot-high brick walls, seemingly matching the towers and buildings inside, and there were only a few heavily guarded entry and exit points in and out of the district. Odret, Melor, and Kanron were just three of the many nothlits who had been dropped off at the Applegate Towers, and like all of their fellows, they didn’t know what they were supposed to do next.

“What are we supposed to do now, Odret?” Kanron asked. Because of the very high numerical designator in his Yeerk name as well as his general naiveté, Kanron was considered by the trio as their “little brother”, the one who was innocent and clueless about the “real world”. “We’re here, in the housing district,” he continued. “What now?”

“The humans said something about the instructions for what to do next being on the vouchers,” Melor replied. “I think that’s where we should look next.”

“And how, in the name of the Kandrona, did you know about that, Melor?” a nothlit who had approached their trio in hopes of learning the same thing that Kanron wanted to know asked.

“I happened to be listening to what the humans were saying about our future on this planet, Milkor,” Melor replied. This caused Milkor, the eavesdropping nothlit, to walk away from their group, but not before calling Melor, “ _Ottak-Kedd_.”

Odret ignored all of this and took out one of the vouchers that the soldier had given him back in the camp. It was a rectangular piece of thick red cardboard paper, and on it were printed the words **THIS VOUCHER ENTITLES THE HOLDER TO ONE (1) FREE APARTMENT IN THE DESIGNATED NOTHLIT HOUSING DISTRICT IN WHICH IT WAS REDEEMED**. “I think I have an idea, my friends,” he told Melor and Kanron, and he headed for the nearest tower and went inside. Melor and Kanron had no choice but to follow him in. Inside, there appeared to be a lobby painted in grayish green-white, and in the middle of that lobby was a desk, behind which sat a human with a thin but curled mustache. “How may I help you, sir?” the human asked as Odret approached him.

“I wish to redeem the one free apartment to which I am entitled, according to this piece of paper,” Odret told him, handing him the red voucher.

“Ah, I see,” the human replied as he took the voucher. “And what about your, er, friends?”

“Get your vouchers out, _nafumet_ ,” Odret hissed at the others, and Melor and Kanron hastily took out their red vouchers as well.

“Very well,” the human said. “Do you wish to stay in three separate apartments or would the three of you like to stay in one large apartment?”

Odret, Melor, and Kanron looked at each other and nodded. “We would like to stay together, if possible,” Odret replied for the three of them.

“As you wish,” the human nodded. “Follow me, please.” The concierge then led the three nothlits into an elevator, which took them up to the topmost floor of the building; the “penthouse,” as the concierge jokingly called it. The concierge then took the three nothlits into a particularly large “suite” with a spacious living room with a large window that gave them an excellent view of the ocean, a well-stocked kitchen with all the latest appliances, and three bedrooms which were each as large as the whole of the apartment where Odret’s former host had lived.

“It’s huge!” Kanron exclaimed as he saw the living room and marveled at the space. “And the sea! I can see the sea!” he said as he ran over to the large window. “Are we going to be staying here, Odret? Are we going to stay here? Please tell me we are staying here!”

“I take it that this is all free, of course,” Odret asked the concierge. “There will be no rent involved, I take it?”

“Yes, you are correct,” the concierge nodded. “All this is free. These vouchers have already taken care of everything for you.”

“Thank you very much, sir,” Odret said, this time truly meaning it.

“But of course,” the concierge replied. As he turned to leave, Odret called out to him. “Is there anywhere near here where men like us can find honest work?”

“I know a few places, sir,” the concierge said. “But I do recommend this restaurant just a couple of blocks from the district walls. I hear they are looking for workers willing to work minimum wage.”

“We will look into it,” Odret said. “As long as it is honest work, I believe we will all gladly accept it.”

* * *

A/N: A short glossary for some Yeerkish expressions used in this chapter.

_Ottak-Kedd_ – A Yeerkish expression which literally means “You have the brain of a Gedd” but, when used as an insult, translates in English to “shit for brains”. Considered as a mild and friendly insult, but can be made into a serious insult with enough gravity and emotion in the speaker’s voice.

_Nafumet_ – Yeerkish. Plural of _nafum_ , which literally means “fool”. Usually used as a term of affection and/or endearment for one’s friend/s when they have done something they shouldn’t have done or not done something they should have done.

Also, if you could just take a little time to write a review/comment telling me what you think of my story, I would really appreciate it!


	3. Transfer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Yeerk Visser turned human nothlit is transported to the designated nothlit housing districts to live out the rest of his life, or so the authorities think.

The line of police cars seemed to stretch into the horizon. The sirens created a raucous cacophony loud enough to almost shatter the eardrums of those who came close enough to observe the proceedings. The cars themselves came from a variety of departments: the Santa Barbara Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the California Highway Patrol, and even the Los Angeles Police Department. The entirety of the LAPD’s SWAT unit had even been activated for this, and their black armored vehicles drove alongside the regular police cars. To anyone watching, it would almost appear as if the police were preparing to head into an actual honest-to-goodness battle.

But in truth, all of these cars and SWAT units were there to protect a single prisoner transport van right in the middle of the convoy. It looked like any other delivery van out there except for the words DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE and UNITED STATES MARSHALS SERVICE printed on the sides of the van along with the seal of the aforementioned federal department and service. Inside the van itself were four Deputy US Marshals armed and kitted out in full battle gear and assault rifles. They surrounded a lone man wearing the classic orange jumpsuit of a prisoner, and he was restrained to his seat in the van by a combination of handcuffs and leather straps on his arms and calves.

At first glance, the prisoner looked just like any other maximum security inmate being transported from one jail to another, although the security surrounding him might seem quite a bit excessive. But the truth was that the man in the orange jumpsuit was not really a man, or at least he hadn’t been born one.

His name was Eldril One-Nine-Two of the Kes Shaan Pool, at least before the United States government had forced him to change his name to Eldril Kesshaan. He was a Yeerk, or rather he had been a Yeerk, and he had once held the rank of Visser Eight during his species’ attempted invasion of Earth. Like his fellow Vissers and Sub-vissers, Eldril had been forced to surrender to the humans after the Animorphs had vented the Yeerks’ Pool ship in orbit around the planet, killing seventeen thousand Yeerks by exposing them to the vacuum of space. But Eldril hadn’t surrendered without a fight. Eldril and his cohorts had made a last stand in a Yeerk Pool somewhere in the state of Pennsylvania (although the exact location of which still remains classified), and his last stand had resulted in the deaths of twelve humans (two of them from either the Pennsylvania Army National Guard or the United States Marine Corps; existing unclassified reports of the events vary in the description), seven Hork-Bajir, fifteen Taxxons, and at least fifteen Yeerks. The end result of his last stand though was that Eldril and the Yeerks under his command were still forced to surrender, and Eldril and his cohorts were removed from their hosts and detained in new, specially constructed Yeerk Pools buried deep in the Rocky Mountains. His rank and prior history meant that Eldril was placed, or actually confined into a small Pool barely big enough for him to swim around in his slug form, and the Kandrona ray supply to his Pool was limited to only the bare minimum, enough to keep him alive but not enough to put him in a constant state of starvation.

But what many people didn’t know about Eldril was that he had a way with words. Eldril should never have gotten out of his Pool prison in the first place owing to his track record as a Visser, a Sub-visser, and his own admitted loyalty and dedication to the Yeerk Empire. But during the classification of Yeerks that had occurred in the post-war aftermath which had eventually resulted in thousands of Yeerks becoming nothlits, Eldril had managed to avoid being classified as a Class One Yeerk (a Yeerk, usually a high-ranking one, who was fanatically and deeply loyal to the Empire). Instead, he managed to talk his classifiers into making him a Class Three Yeerk (a Yeerk whose views of the Empire and their methods of expansion were ambivalent to say the least). Eldril did that by using the classic Nuremberg defense, attributing all of his actions as a Sub-visser and later on Visser to orders coming down from the Council of Thirteen, even adding in a few sob stories of how he almost came close to dying because he didn’t sign off on the execution of a subordinate quickly enough.

Eldril also managed to talk his way out of the seemingly irrefutable evidence showing that he was completely loyal to the Empire by claiming that his loyalty lay not with the Yeerk Empire itself but in the concept of a free and sovereign Yeerk nation not under the influence of another species like the Andalites. Of course, the humans doing the classification had their misgivings about Eldril and his version of events, but as there was little if any time for them to poke holes at his story, the committee had no choice but to classify Eldril as a Class Three Yeerk.

Three years after the end of the Yeerk invasion, and two years after his classification as a Class Three Yeerk, Eldril qualified for parole from his Pool prison on account of his good behavior. Eldril was allowed to become a nothlit, and he was given the choice of being either a human or an animal nothlit. Unsurprisingly, he chose to become a human nothlit, and after two hours and fifteen minutes of waiting around in his new human form, Eldril One-Nine-Two of the Kes Shaan Pool became simply Eldril Kesshaan. He became the highest ranking Visser in human captivity to be allowed to become a human-form nothlit (and survive; Visser Seven was also allowed to become a human nothlit but he tried to demorph back to his Yeerk form at only one hour and fifty-eight minutes, resulting in his immediate execution).

Now it was time to transport Eldril to his new home. Eldril was originally supposed to have been sent to an actual maximum security prison as a continuation of his original sentence, but his defense successfully argued that Eldril had technically already served his time during his solitary confinement in his tiny little Pool in the Rockies, and that throwing him into a federal penitentiary would be equivalent to double jeopardy. Of course it wasn’t stated so bluntly and openly; it was all couched in bureaucratese and legalese, but it did have the intended effect of setting Eldril free. Free of the American justice system, at the very least.

Of course, Eldril wouldn’t be too free though. Eldril would be free from the human prisons, but he would be confined in one of the designated nothlit housing districts, his every movement tracked by the ankle monitor clipped to his right leg. The anklet was specially designed to tell the authorities if Eldril had gone beyond the walls of the designated nothlit housing district where he was due to be transported. It was for this reason that the Applegate Towers district in Santa Barbara had been chosen for Eldril’s new home, because of its proximity to three law enforcement agencies that could response to a breach in the district’s security within minutes.

Ivan Sanchez had been a sergeant with the Santa Barbara Police Department at the time of Eldril’s transfer from the Rockies to the Applegate Towers. He had not been infested by the Yeerks during the invasion, but he knew many others in the department who had been made into Controllers in that time. It is estimated that between 75 to 90 percent of the personnel of the Santa Barbara Police Department had been infested by the Yeerks, according to survivor testimonies and recovered records from captured Yeerk computers. “I had just arrived at Santa Barbara after a stint in the Bay Area,” Sanchez recounted. “And before that I had been a Navy MP down at San Diego. I guess you could say that I was quite the nomad. Which, I’m guessing, is the reason why the Yeerks probably didn’t try to infest me. There was always a possibility that I could get reassigned yet again, to a place where they probably hadn’t established a base of operations yet. They couldn’t take the risk, I guess, so that meant that I got to walk free.

“But I knew guys who _were_ infested,” Sanchez continued. “Heck, I got to know quite a few guys in the department _while_ they were infested. After the war, when I got to meet some of these guys again and they no longer had Yeerks in their heads, it was like I was meeting them all again for the very first time. And they were all really affected in some way or another by what the Yeerks had done to them. Some of them had fought with all they had against the slugs, but many of them didn’t really fight that hard because they had been told by the worms that the consequences would be that their families would be taken and infested as well. Not that it helped out some of them, because some members of their families still fell into the trap of the Sharing even though their Yeerks hadn’t forced them to do any recruiting.”

Sanchez had gone to the Applegate Towers to see Eldril transferred into the housing district, along with quite a number of his fellow Santa Barbara cops and detectives who had been infested by the Yeerks during the invasion. “Me, I was just curious about the whole thing,” Sanchez recalled. “But some of the other guys wanted to see the slugs being put in their rightful place. Chief Rosa was there as well. Man, she really hated them Yeerks. The worms took her daughter and used her to get their slimy tentacles on the Chief and infest her. And now that the Yeerks had been defeated, the Chief wanted to see them and gloat over them, at least some of them, at their lowest, just as they had done with her.”

The prisoner transport van peeled away from the convoy surrounding it and stopped in front of the gates leading to the Applegate Towers, where it waited for the guards to lift the barrier and let it through. The van proceeded down the path that had been carved out of the throng of nothlits curious about the new arrival by policemen on foot. The van finally stopped in front of an apartment building almost right in the geographic center of the district, but apart from that it was indistinguishable from every other apartment building in the district. But it was also about to become the first residence of the future leader of the Nothlit State.

The doors at the back of the van opened, and two US Marshals clad in black and packing full combat gear hopped out. They stayed close to the van as they waited for the other Marshals inside to release Eldril from his seat and carry him out of the van. The seat faced the back of the van, making for a very unpleasant and uncomfortable ride for the person made to sit in it. The Marshals removed the straps around Eldril’s arms and legs, and then they made him stand up inside the van. But because Eldril’s human form was tall even by American standards at the time, the Marshals had to make Eldril bend over at the waist until he was finally out of the van. He blinked and squinted as his eyes adjusted from the darkness of the van’s interior to the early morning sun, and then he took in a deep lungful of the cold ocean air. “Ah, to be finally free again,” he muttered.

“Don’t get used to it, Eldril,” one of the black-clad US Marshals told him. “Now get a move on, slug!” The same Marshal that had spoken to Eldril pushed him forward, and the former Visser began walking towards the apartment, flanked by the fully armed Marshals.

Rosa Stein, chief of police for Santa Barbara, was standing at the top of the stairs leading to the apartment building. She was flanked by her fellow police officers, Ivan Sanchez among them. Rosa Stein was one of the more notable casualties of the Yeerk invasion in Santa Barbara, having been infested by the invaders with the help of her very own daughter Taylor. Three years after the end of the war, Chief Stein was still undergoing treatment, therapy and counseling for her time as a Controller as well as the mysterious disappearance of Taylor Stein. Speculation abounds as to the fate of Taylor, and while the answer to that particular question may have been given to us in one of the later _Animorphs_ books (specifically, number 43, _The Test_ ), the doubts about the veracity of the events depicted in the book series means that there are a lot of people out there who believe that Taylor Stein did not die in a natural gas explosion meant to eliminate the Yeerk Peace Movement in Santa Barbara.

“Yeah, the Chief really had been through some shit,” Sanchez recalled. “I mean, imagine it from her point of view: first your daughter almost dies in a fire, and she loses an arm and a leg, literally. Then these weirdos, these mysterious people who look like they’re in a cult, they tell your daughter that they can give her her arm and leg back, but in exchange they will put an alien slug in her head that will make her do the same to you. And your daughter accepts, and so now you’ve both got slugs in your head and you are now subordinate to your daughter, and now you’re going to spend the next three, four, five years as a prisoner and a slave inside your own mind and body. You tell me that that isn’t enough to mess you up. It’s enough to mess anybody up!”

Chief Stein and the other Santa Barbara officers waited until Eldril had finally arrived at the top of the stairs. “Man looked so smug as he got up the stairs,” Sanchez recounted. “It didn’t help that the bastard had the kind of face that you just wanted to punch so bad, and repeatedly at that. Blue eyes, skinhead, thick beard; Eldril really looked like your average white supremacist trailer trash. Or maybe a serial killer or even a mass shooter. If you didn’t know who Eldril was, that was what you would think he was if you met him for the first time.”

“Chief Stein,” Eldril said in a surprised but friendly tone when he saw the chief and the other officers waiting for him, as if he had come across them during a morning jog. “Fancy meeting you here, of all places.”

“You know that this is much, much more than you really deserve, Yeerk filth,” Stein hissed as she made to confront Eldril face to face. “If I had my way, you would never have been allowed to leave your tiny little Pool cell.”

“It’s nice to see you too, Rosa,” Eldril said with a nod, acting like he hadn’t heard a single word that Stein had said. “Do tell your daughter I said hi, if you ever see her.”

“All right, Eldril, time to get moving again,” one of the Marshals behind him said, and the nothlit was pushed forward with the flat side of an assault rifle, forcing him to get moving again. Eldril and the Marshals walked into the lobby of the apartment building, followed by the Santa Barbara officers, but today there was no concierge to greet them. And instead of the elevator, the Marshals shepherded Eldril into the emergency staircase where SWAT troopers in their combat gear and black balaclavas covering their faces stood guard. Each man had a clear field of vision to the man both above and below him, meaning that it would be near impossible for someone to move up and down the stairs without them noticing. Eldril and his Marshal escorts took the stairs up to the eleventh floor, where they all got out and walked towards an apartment in the middle of the hallway they had appeared in. And even though the police had already swept the apartments numerous times before Eldril’s transfer, protocol demanded that the Marshals still open the door to Eldril’s new apartment as if they were entering a hostile area, as if a pack of Hork-Bajir-Controllers would suddenly jump out of the apartment to free Eldril.

But there was no hidden army of Hork-Bajir inside the apartment waiting to free the Visser. Once the Marshals had confirmed that the apartment was clear, they dragged Eldril inside. The place was small, about as big as the living room of a cheap suburban house. The couch at the front of the apartment also doubled as a folding bed, although currently it was still in its couch configuration. Beyond the living room-cum-bedroom was a kitchen small enough to fit inside a restaurant’s walk-in refrigerator and a door leading to a bathroom that was basically a glorified shower stall with a toilet included.

The Marshals practically dumped Eldril onto the couch, and they waited until Rosa Stein was inside the apartment with them. “Welcome to what should be your last home for the rest of your miserable life, Eldril,” Stein said. “God knows that you should be in solitary confinement in a place like Fox River. But if you can keep up your little show of good behavior, you could end up staying in this dingy little place until you die. Now there are some rules that you will have to follow if you don’t want to end up in a place like Lompoc, but I’m sure that you’re going to break them anyway, so I’m just letting you know what they are. For the next thirty days, you cannot leave your apartment. You cannot leave this tiny little room. All your food and your other bodily needs will be provided to you by the concierge or the floor mother, kind of like back when you were still a Visser. After those first thirty days, you can now step out of your apartment, but you cannot step out of the Applegate Towers. Step out of your apartment in the next thirty days or outside the Applegate Towers after that and you will find your ass being thrown into a maximum security prison, and I will enjoy every minute of it, although not as much as if you had just remained as the slug that you truly are.

“And don’t even think about tampering or tinkering with your new bling,” Stein continued, referring to the ankle monitor on Eldril’s leg. “We _will_ know if you’re trying to remove or tamper with your tracker, and that will also get your ass in jail for breaking the terms of your parole.” Stein then bent down to look Eldril eye to eye. “One word of advice from me to you, Eldril, just so you can’t say that I’ve been too hard on you,” she told him. “Don’t drop the soap.” This got a few laughs from the otherwise hardened and emotionless Marshals and police officers.

“Prisoner transport complete,” a Marshal reported on his radio, and the Marshals and the officers left Eldril’s apartment. The nothlit and former Visser of the Yeerk Empire looked around his new lodgings, and then he leaned back on his couch-bed and crossed his hands behind his head. “I could get used to this,” he said.

No one can really know (well, no one except Eldril himself) whether this was the moment that it happened or not, but the moment that Eldril Kesshaan had been transferred to the Applegate Towers is one of the leading candidates for the moment that Eldril decided that he would create the Nothlit State.


	4. Encounters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Yeerk nothlit gets a job in an Italian restaurant, but he soon learns that humans are a very vindictive bunch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve decided to drop the angle that the story of the Nothlit State presented here was compiled through interviews with survivors and those affiliated with the group who are still alive or here on Earth. It turns out that it’s just not my style. Starting from this chapter, this story will be like a regular story; no documentary feel and narrations by talking heads. I hope you enjoy it all the same. – GR

It took a few days for the Culathesh trio of Odret, Melor, and Kanron to get settled into their new home, namely the “penthouse” suite that had been given to them when they had arrived at the Applegate Towers following their incarceration in the Arizona camps. They had to admit that they were surprised with the sheer size of the place that their housing vouchers had given them; Odret’s human host had only lived in a much, much smaller apartment, and both Melor and Kanron had never had human hosts before. But they all acknowledged that they had gotten lucky with this one; if they had arrived here even just a day later than they actually did then they could all very well have been put into the “real” apartments, the small ones that Odret remembered not-so-fondly while in his host.

More nothlits had arrived at the Applegate Towers as the trio fixed up their place and tried to make into something where they would enjoy living. But there was only so much that they could do before their vouchers ran out and they had to worry about how they were going to eat. New vouchers were provided the nothlits every month, but Odret had told the others that he wanted them to not become so reliant on the vouchers, which was why on the third day of their arrival, Odret finally braved the outside of the Applegate Towers and ventured back into the city, the city in which he used to live as an alien invader inside a human’s head.

The restaurant that the concierge had mentioned had a job vacancy when Odret and his friends had arrived was indeed just a short thirty-minute walk away from the Towers, and when Odret got there he was pleased to see that the vacancy had still not been filled for the three days that he and his friends had taken to settle into their new place. There was a HELP WANTED sign hanging in front of the restaurant, so that was how Odret knew that he could still seek employment there. He also saw that the sign hanging on the restaurant’s door was on OPEN, and so Odret immediately entered the restaurant.

There was a bell attached to the door to signal to the restaurant’s staff that someone had just come in, and even before Odret had taken a single step inside, a man dressed in a red apron over a white shirt and black slacks shouted without even turning to face him, “We don’t serve until ten AM, buddy. Get lost!”

“Actually, I am here to answer your request for help,” Odret replied. “I am not here to eat.”

“Answer our request for what?” the other man asked again.

“The sign outside,” Odret explained. “It says that you want help.”

“Oh, that,” the man muttered as he finally understood. “All right, guy you wanna talk to the Boss for that. And you’re just in luck ‘cause the Boss decided to come in early today. He’s in the back, right beside the kitchen. The door on the right, mind you. The one in front of you is the restroom, and usually that’s where Davey reads the morning paper. And you do not want to go in there right now.”

Odret nodded his head, and then he repeated the man’s directions as he made his way through the restaurant before finally ending up at the back. The kitchen was to his left, and he knew that the restroom would be in front of him at that point, so he turned to the right and looked at the door in front of him. There was a brass plaque screwed into the wood with the words HUMAN RESOURCES etched into the metal. Odret hesitated a little, not really sure of what to do next. Thoughts and questions raced around in his mind. What if the humans didn’t accept him for the job? What if the humans wouldn’t accept him because of what he really was, or used to be? What if the humans simply refused to even talk to him? Odret shook his head to clear the thoughts away. He had already gone this far; he wasn’t going to turn back so easily. Odret took hold of the doorknob, opened it, and went inside.

“For the love of God, Fons, the place isn’t even open yet! And you’re already asking me for the money?” A man of medium height then turned around to face the newcomer into his office, and that was when he realized that this man was not the man that he was expecting to see right now. “You’re not the Fons,” he told Odret.

“No, I do not think that I am,” Odret replied. “My name is not ‘The Fons’, sir. And I am not here for your money. I am here to give you the help that you have wanted.”

“The help that I wanted? What are you talking about—oh, yeah,” the Boss mumbled as he also remembered the sign that he had ordered put up in front of the restaurant. “You’re here for the job opening?”

“Yes, sir,” Odret nodded.

“Well, you’ve come to the right man to ask for it. Name’s Tommaso Perugiani.” He held out his hand for Odret to shake. “My friends call me Tommy, and my staff calls me the Boss. My official title is ‘Human Resources Manager’, but that’s just a fancy-shmancy term of letting you know that I can hire and fire whoever I want. And right now I haven’t decided if I should even hire you. Call it a gut feeling, you know. But I’m willing to take a chance. So you say you want to work here at Boccino’s, huh?”

“Yes, sir,” Odret said. “I have just arrived here from Arizona. I wish to perform honest work for your restaurant.”

“So you want some honest work, huh?” the Boss nodded. “Well, I got plenty of that where I came from. But before we can talk about terms and responsibilities and all that junk, I’m gonna need to see some ID first. ‘Cause I gotta be honest with you, man. I ain’t never seen you around here before, and I’ve been in this business too long to ever trust a new face on sight. I’ve been ripped off too many times before, kid. And nobody ever rips off the Boss and gets away with it.”

“Oh, I would never think of doing such a thing, Boss,” Odret said. “And here is my identification, sir. I believe that that is what ID means. I hope that this will be enough to satisfy your curiosity.” He took out his blue Nothlit Identity Card and handed it over to the Boss. The Boss’s eyebrows rose when he noticed the color of Odret’s ID. “Blue ID?” he asked. “You’re one of them alien whatsits that had to become human after forcing yourselves into our brains?”

“Yes, sir,” Odret nodded.

“Geez, Louise,” the Boss muttered. “Well, things just got interesting.” He then examined the ID card slowly and intently. “So your name is Odret Culathesh, eh?” he asked again. Odret nodded his head. “You know, my sister-in-law had one of your slug brothers in her head for four years. Never even found out until those kids who can turn into animals, the Anima-whatsits, said that we were being invaded by brain slugs and these tall bladed aliens took her away to wherever.”

The Boss then dropped the ID onto his desk and laid his elbows on top of the varnished wood, and his fingers formed a triangle in front of his mouth. “Looks like you’re in luck, Mr. Culathesh,” he said. “As it so happens, there is a job opening in the restaurant that you can fill almost immediately. You start work tomorrow as a… hygiene technician. Do good at that job and maybe, just maybe, you’ll find yourself moving up the ladder of the service crew. But for right now, remember that you’re still a hygiene technician. There’s a tailor down the street who supplies our uniforms, so you might wanna go there after and get fitted.”

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.” Then, just before he stood up, Odret realized that there was something else that he had to ask. “Sir, may I ask about the money?” he said to the Boss.

The Boss gave Odret a cool and appraising look above the triangle formed by his fingers. This lasted for a few minutes before the Boss’s mouth moved from an emotionless grim line into a big, wide smile. “Of course you can ask about the money, Mr. Culathesh,” he said. “Does five bucks an hour sound good to you?”

“Bucks?” Odret repeated. It took him some time before he remembered that humans had numerous terms for their monetary units. “Oh, I see. Five dollars an hour. Yes, sir, that is most satisfactory.”

“Good man,” the Boss said, and then he stood up from behind his desk. “Welcome to Boccino’s, Mr. Culathesh,” he said as he offered his hand to shake once again. He then gave Odret back his ID card. “I really hope that this is the start of a good business partnership and you’re not going to screw me over in the long run.”

As Odret turned to leave the Boss’s office, the man called out once more. “Oh, and when you get back here tomorrow, Mr. Culathesh, make sure that you’ve got your ID where everybody can see it. New city ordinance, you know. It’s not really required yet but you know me. I’m not taking any chances.”

“Of course, Boss. Anything you say,” Odret said cheerfully. Little did the nothlit know that that decision was the start of his going down a path of darkness, despair, and eventually misguided revenge.

“So, Odret, did you get the job?” Melor Six-Seven-Zero-One of the Culat Hesh Pool, now known as Melor Culathesh, asked Odret when the latter had returned from Boccino’s.

“I did, actually,” Odret replied. “Were you expecting me to not get the job?”

“I did not say that,” Melor countered. “But I also did not expect you to get the job so quickly. I thought that you would have to wait for some time before you are finally accepted, like how things were in the Empire.”

“You don’t really believe that about the Empire, do you?” Odret asked. “There are things that the Empire got wrong, and one of them is telling us that we all have to wait before getting promoted. The Vissers and Sub-vissers only promote among themselves, and if you want to become a sub-visser, you have to be willing to kill even your own friends. But human work is nowhere near as bad as that.”

“Well, isn’t that reassuring,” Melor muttered with more than just a hint of sarcasm.

“You know, maybe you and Kanron should get some jobs yourselves,” Odret said. “Why should I be the only one working among us? It will help you get accustomed to the humans, and it will also let them see that we are actively working to mend the rift between our species. It is, as the humans say, a win-win for all.”

“Maybe I will, Odret,” Melor mused. “Maybe I will.”

For the first few days of Odret Culathesh’s employment at Boccino’s, he felt that he was doing a very good job as a hygiene technician. He had been given a mop, a rag, and a belt of cleaning supplies and then told to clean the restrooms and the floor of the whole restaurant, and Odret had gotten down to the task immediately. His fellow workmates at Boccino’s as well as the restaurant’s patrons had noticed his incredible work ethic almost immediately, and they praised him for it. They told Odret that they had never seen anyone who mopped the floor or the wiped the tables as cleanly and as thoroughly as he did. And at first, Odret actually took it as a compliment. In his mind, he thought that the humans were praising him because he, a former Yeerk, was performing menial tasks like it was the most important thing on the planet. Odret also thought that by showing the humans that he was a hard worker, he would be able to help convince them that humans and Yeerks _could_ live side by side in harmony.

He had no way of knowing that things would unfold in such a way that he would eventually think himself a fool for even believing in those.

The spills and “accidents” started happening just one week after he had begun working for Boccino’s. At first, it was just a glass getting knocked over here and some food or pizza dropping to the floor there. Then the spills started happening more and more, and the accidents got larger and larger until whole gallon glasses of soft drinks or iced tea were being spilled right in front of Odret, and there was even a time when an entire plate of spaghetti was dropped right in his path. He paid little attention to it at first because he didn’t think that all of these “accidents” were connected in any way, and then there was one incident that, for him, would serve to “open his eyes” to the truth of post-Yeerk Invasion America.

It happened nine weeks into his job. By that time, Odret already knew both the staff and the regulars at Boccino’s very well, as well as they would have liked to have known someone who used to be one of the alien slugs that had been trying to force their way into people’s brains just three to four years ago. None of the regulars had ever spilled their drink or their food in front of Odret, at least not on purpose, but the same couldn’t be said for the other patrons of Boccino’s, the ones who had come there through word of mouth or plain old curiosity. Two of these new patrons had just come in. They were two women, and Odret had never seen them in Boccino’s before. They had already received their orders by the time that Odret was beginning to clean the tables and floor in their vicinity, and as he wiped down the tables, he noticed that the women were looking at him furtively while talking to themselves.

As he passed by their table, one of the women knocked over her glass, and it fell to the floor. It was a very large glass, one of the “gallon glasses” that Boccino’s had as a promotional item. The glass was about half full of iced tea when the woman knocked it over, and it made for a very large mess on the black-and-white linoleum floor of the restaurant. “Oh, no!” the woman exclaimed. “Mister, excuse me! We need help here!” she called out.

Odret ran over to their table immediately. “Yes, miss, how may I help you?” he asked. The woman didn’t say anything; she simply pointed at the pool of iced tea and melting ice cubes on the floor. “Oh, and can we get another gallon glass?” the other woman asked.

“Yes, miss, of course,” Odret replied. “I’ll go tell one of the servers straight away.” He then hurried over to his cart and took out his mop, which he slid over to the iced tea puddle on the floor. As he began wiping away the mess, he heard the women begin talking once again. Their voices were low and hushed, but despite that, or maybe because he was not really not that focused on his task, he was able to hear what they were saying.

“God, these body snatchers really are so gullible!” one of the women, the one who had asked for a new glass, said to her friend. “Steffi and Karen _were_ right. They’ll do anything you want ‘em to do.”

“Yeah, and I really shouldn’t have called him over so quickly,” the other woman, the one who had spilled her drink, replied. “I should have waited for him to see it. Karen said he would have cleaned it up without asking.”

“This is just so sad. How did we end up losing to these slugs?”

“I know, right?” This elicited quite a bit of laughter from the both of them, laughter that pierced Odret to his very core. But he didn’t give any indication that he had heard them, except for maybe a subtle stiffening of his body, and he continued cleaning up their spill.

The women’s laughter kept ringing in Odret’s ears throughout the day, and they would keep echoing in his head for years to come.

As soon as his shift ended, Odret decided that he wanted to talk about this incident with the Boss. He walked over to his office and knocked on the door. “It’s open!” the Boss called out. Odret opened the door and stuck his head inside the office. “Boss, can I trouble you about something?”

“Well, if it’s about a raise, Odret, then no,” the Boss replied. And then he let out a soft chuckle, a laugh that Odret didn’t understand. “I’m just kidding, man. Come in! Don’t be shy.”

Odret went into the Boss’s office and sat down on the only chair in the office that wasn’t occupied by the Boss himself. “So what brings you to the inner sanctum, Odret?” he asked.

Odret pondered on how he should bring up the incident with the two women without sounding like he was accusing them. After a few moments, he gave up on subtlety and decided to lay it all before the Boss. “So there were two women earlier today,” he said. “They spilled their iced tea.”

“So what, Odret? That thing happens all the time, man,” the Boss shrugged. “What’s your point?”

“I’m not finished yet, Boss. As I was saying, these two girls spilled their iced tea, and then while I was cleaning up their mess, I heard them laughing at me. They were laughing at me, Boss, and they said that I was trying too hard to be like a human. Boss, I’m only trying to do my job. Why would they say something like that about me? Why would they laugh at me?”

The Boss sighed and took off his glasses. “Oo-kay, how am I gonna explain you this?” he asked, more to himself than to Odret. “We humans are quite the unforgiving lot, Odret,” he said. “We kill each other all the time, sometimes for the silliest reasons and sometimes without a reason at all. We hold grudges that have been around for what feels like hundreds or even thousands of years. And that’s just against our own kind. Imagine what happened when your kind came along and tried to shove your slimy little bodies into our heads and steal our bodies. It’s pretty much the same thing, except only directed at you guys now.”

“I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Odret said.

The Boss sighed once again. “I was afraid you were gonna say that,” he said. “All right, let me come at this from another angle. “So you Yeerks came down to our planet and began infesting our fellow humans, and then we fought back and won against you guys. That’s why you and your friends now look like humans as well instead of the slugs that you used to be, _capiche_? The part about you Yeerks infesting us didn’t sit well with a lot of us. But the part that’s really bothering all these people? You guys, you not-lits or whatever you’re called now, you used to be Yeerks, and now you’re human. And now we’re all supposed to treat you like you’ve always been human in the first place? Now that’s just nasty. Just try to imagine it from our point of view, Odret. We had this bunch of aliens trying to take over our bodies, and now that they’ve been forced to become human, we have to treat them like humans. Now that’s just not fair for a lot of us. You’ve been stealing our freedom, our rights. Why should we have to give you guys the same thing now? Good luck getting people to agree to that, man.”

Odret shook his head in frustration. No matter how hard he tried to digest the Boss’s words or interpret them in so many ways, nothing of what the Boss had told him still made sense, and he said so to the Boss. “Ah, that’s all right,” the Boss nodded. “We humans are hard to understand, even to ourselves. We smash our opponents into the dust and then we’re the first ones to offer them the helping hand, especially once they’ve conceded defeat.”

“But why would they pick on me though?” Odret asked. “How do they know that I’m a nothlit? I’m supposed to look like a human. I _am_ a human now, right?”

“Oh, Odret, I don’t know,” the Boss replied. “Sure, you look like a human, act like a human, maybe even speak like a human when you’re not so formal, but we humans just _know_ that you’re not one of us. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s psychological, maybe it’s instinct. And your ID is also probably a dead giveaway. Almost everyone knows nothlits have blue IDs. It’s all over the news. Some government thing, probably.”

Odret looked down at the blue identification card clipped to the chest of his uniform apron. It was a simple thing: a piece of laminated blue cardboard bearing his name, picture, and a graphic with the text SEAL OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY. Eventually, Odret would come to see the ID as a symbol of the human oppression of Yeerk nothlits, but for the moment it was still just a simple blue card for him.

“Thanks for taking the time to listen to me, Boss,” Odret said in a hollow tone, not really meaning the words.

“Don’t worry about it, Odret,” the Boss shrugged. “All part of the job for me.”

Odret walked out of the Boss’s office with more questions than answers. What little answers that the nothlit had gotten from his human boss made as little sense as the actions that the human women had done right in front of him. He needed more time to process all of this, and he wasn’t going to get that time back in the penthouse with both Melor and Kanron pestering him with questions of their own, so Odret, instead of walking right out of Boccino’s as had been his routine, he opted to take a seat on one of the tables beside the large windows in front of the restaurant. His eyes stared blankly ahead of him as he pondered the day’s events.

The doors of Boccino’s rang open, and two black men wearing green jackets and caps walked into the restaurant. It was already a little after ten in the evening, more than an hour after closing time at Boccino’s, but none of the staff inside made any move to turn the new arrivals away. One of the waiters, who was also black, even did something with his hands and fingers that attracted the attention of the other black men and they did the same thing with their hands before the three bumped fists and the waiter went back to fixing up the tables.

The two men looked around and took the table nearest to the door. This gave them a good view of the restaurant, and it also gave them a good look at the musing Odret Culathesh, who at that point had removed the ID from his chest and was staring at it. “Hey yo, check out this minimum wage hygiene technician, man,” one of the black men said. “White boy so down, he look ready to off himself!”

“Man, how’d’you know fool’s a hygiene technician?” the other man asked.

“Eyeball the blue ID in his hands, nigga. Cracker ain’t really a cracker. He one of them space alien slugs used to tryna take over us a few years back!”

“So wait a minute, OG. You tryna tell me that cracker over there’s got a space slug in his head right now?”

“Naw, nigga. I’m tellin’ ya, _he_ one of them space slugs! We’s blasted they asses back to they home planet thanks to them blue horses with the four eyes and the shiv tails, and then them space horses done ordered the space slugs we got as POWs to morph into humans or animals, and here we are!”

The two men then stood up from their table and walked over to Odret. “Hey, body snatcher!” one of them, the one with the green jacket and bandana wrapped around his neck, called out to the nothlit. “Don’t get used to your new body, nigga,” he told Odret. “Someone gon’ prolly fuck you up for it!” They then laughed, even louder than the women had earlier in the day, and Odret immediately wished that he could demorph back into a Yeerk and fall down to the floor underneath the table.

“Gentlemen,” the Boss called out as he suddenly appeared behind the black men. “Daquan, Lamarcus, stop messing around with my employees. I know that you’re here ‘cause your bosses have an offer for my bosses. Why don’t we talk about it in my office, huh? And you!” he said, pointing at Odret. “What the fuck are you still doing here? Get outta here! Scram!”

Odret shook his head and ran out of the restaurant as fast as his human legs would allow him. The men’s words and laughter echoed in his mind. Suddenly, a lump formed out of nowhere inside his throat, and fluid began to flow from his eyes. What in the name of the Kandrona was going? What was happening? What was happening to him? Why were the humans so rude, so offensive to him? And why was nobody standing up for his defense? Why couldn’t he stand up for himself? Was this how it felt like to be a host to a Yeerk? Odret most certainly felt defenseless, unable to do anything at all. Yes, there was no Yeerk inside his new human head taking control away from him, but this was an unprecedented new feeling for him: helplessness. Nothing made sense for him, and any attempt on his part to clarify things only made things even worse.

As Odret walked back to the nothlit district with tears flowing from his eyes, a new and even more deeply unsettling question popped into his mind. If the humans could get away with this kind of humiliation against the nothlits, then how long before one of them finally went all the way and killed a nothlit? How would the humans react to that? _Would_ the humans even react to that? Odret did not even bother trying to thinking about an answer to that question.


End file.
